Guerra de las Vajillas, La

Dinamic Software was one of the leading Spanish publishers of the eighties, and La Guerra de las Vajillas, released for the ZX Spectrum in 1988, is part of its catalogue, credited to Rafael Hernandez Stark and Javier Cubedo. The title itself turns on wordplay, which was typical for the domestic scene: Spanish games of the period often carried jokes and references that never travelled, and a good number of them stayed known mainly at home.

The Spectrum imposed particular constraints. Colour was assigned in blocks, so overlapping objects produced the characteristic colour bleed, and audio came from a single-channel speaker. Spanish developers responded much as their British counterparts did, with large high-contrast sprites and brisk movement, since fine graphical detail would have been lost on this hardware anyway.

Dinamic releases had a reputation for being hard. Limited lives, no save function and level layouts that had to be memorised were the norm, which made sense in an era of cassette loading and short overall running times. Anyone starting one today should expect the first several attempts to end quickly, and should expect the rules to reveal themselves through play rather than through any explanatory screen.

OldGame.cz runs the game directly in the browser. For Spanish eight-bit titles that matters more than usual, since tracking them down and configuring an emulator is time-consuming and the surviving documentation is considerably thinner than it is for the British output of the same years.